We started on Thursday with Holmenkollen ski jump as this opens until eight in the evening. The views from the top weren’t that spectacular as the cloud was down and the plastic windows are pretty sratched/dirty so you won’t get any good photos at the best of times. I vaguely remembered the attached ski museum as just being an excuse to justify the high entrance fee for what is otherwise just a tall tower but I was pleasantly surprised by the variety of the displays.
The next day we started off with the City Hall, ostensibly because it opened earliest but in reality most attractions were open by the time we made it in to town! From there we went to the Nobel Peace Center whilst waiting for the next boat to Bygdøy. This has some very flashy displays but I have to confess that I wasn’t impressed. The benefit of the old fashioned museum display case was that you could just glance at the content, read the title, or stop and take in the full text. In contrast, many modern electronic displays expect that you will stop, wait for them to reach the start and then watch them all the way through to get the message – impractical unless you are going to devote the whole day to a museum.
By the time we got back to the boat there was a long queue so we just took the bus over to Bygdøy. We’ve done the Kon Tiki and Viking Ship museums before so headed for the Fram Museum. The Fram is the vessel that Nansen and Amundsen used to explore the polar regions. The museum is built around the boat and the story is well told by the surrounding displays. Next stop was the Seafaring Museum. I can’t claim to have been too impressed by all of the model boats and we didn’t last long in the panoramic film as it was too loud for Emma.
This time we made it on the boat back to the city centre. We took it in turns to visit the Norwegian Resistance Museum at Akershus Fortress. This is much larger on the inside than it appears from the outside and tells the fascinating story of the Norwegian people’s fight against the German occupation during the Second World War. I then had a quick sprint around the inside of the fortress itself – all that it really merits.
Christine headed home at this point whilst I went on to the Munch Museum. I’m not sure what makes it a museum rather than simply a gallery. It undoubtedly demonstrates my preference for science over art that it was the exhibition on the restoration of the recovered Scream and Madonna paintings that I found most interesting.